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It’s not a crime if it was for science.
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Outside of the longing to conduct social experiments, a popular one is dropping a toaster atop your co-worker’s head to test gravity and ensure it still works. You could say the internet has and can take us places we never thought possible.
We can go to many locations, stay in touch with people close and far, and have the ability to get our digital hands on anything provided we have the coin. So, with all the good, what’s the bad? Well, the bad is, again being able to get your digital hands-on certain items, most of which could be questionable, if you have the coin.
I mean, it shouldn’t be that easy but here we are. One of which is someone mails you a flash drive saying “Hot Nudes, your spouse will never know. Don’t worry.” You should worry and never put the flash drive into your system because your spouse will know when the computer starts acting wonky and a virus begins to run rampant on your machine and very soon, your network. Again, five minutes of fun could have you rooted, and I’ll go over how.
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Capture and Release
Have you ever watched The Simpsons and heard the famous line from Mr. Burns, “Release the hounds”? If you haven’t here’s a brief overview, Mr. Burns is mainly an evil rich guy who employs Homer and a few of his friends, and when the mood strikes, he will tell his assistant Mr. Smithers to release the hounds to chase Homer off.
So in a sense, what every corporate boss wants to do but legal reasons stop them. I use this phrase because it’s symbolic of what happens after releasing a virus or what it is actual name is a worm. Computer worms are a subset of trojan malware that can self-replicate from one computer to another and eventually spread through a network without human intervention.
The original name was The Morris Worm, named after Robert Tappan Morris. Robert being a simple student at Cornell University created this worm with the intention to gauge the size of the precursor internet of the time “ARPANET” (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)– the first public computer network mainly used for academics and research.
However, this testing resulted in a denial-of-service (DoS) for 60,000 machines back in 1988. But the fun doesn’t stop there, the United States v. Morris 1991, resulting Morris being the first convicted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act having a nice price tag of three years in prison, 400 hours of community service, and finally paying a fine of $10,000. This may have you thinking twice about trying to view spicy pictures of kittens on your family computer.
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Vectors of Infection
A worm, how is it different from a virus? Worms, as mentioned earlier, tend to be able to self-replicate and spread throughout linked computers and then onto the network.
Viruses, on the other hand, tend to be attached to files or programs and hide until transferred elsewhere unknowingly. So if you wanted this in nightclub terms, worms are crabs and viruses are herpes.
Some of the vectors used for infection are emails, file sharing, instant messaging, smartphones, flash drives, and if it’s connected to the internet in some fashion, game over man could be heard from everyone on your contact list and pretty much around the world. The six degrees of separation would no longer exist if a worm were never quarantined and dealt with.
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Keeping safe via Updates
So, how would you be able to tell if you have a computer worm running around making its wormy babies on your PC (Personal Computer)? Some signs are files making like a deadbeat parent and just disappearing (I’m not going to single out deadbeat fathers, there are deadbeat mothers too).
Your computer begins to run slower close to sluggish, this could be caused by the worm taking up memory as it spreads leading to a large amount of free space being taken up. So at this point, you may be thinking “Wow this suck, I want to see spicy pictures of kittens, but I don’t want crabs.”
Well, you’re in luck, and don’t let your spouse know that Z-Daddy told you this. Some ways to prevent catching a worm or “crabs”, Deadliest Catch, staying away from downloading from unknown sources, verifying with your contacts if something is sent from them, keeping the operating system up to date, and having antivirus software and making sure that’s up to date as well.
Morris may have created a monster that caused a decent amount of chaos and was the first person to get freshly smacked with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) but went on to cofound the online store Viaweb and later funded firm Y Combinator. So every cloud has a silver lining.
Tina: That’s not what he meant Mark, stop skimming and actually read.
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Figure there’s some information I missed on computer worms. Scripted a comment below.
